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Keeping Beauty Expenditure on a College Budget.

As being brought up in an Asian family, knowing exactly where my money flows to is always the No.1 thing top on the to-to list for each month. Since March just ended, so my budget review happened over the past weekend. Here is the result:

Food: $197.4

Grocery: $45.80

Rent: $699

Gas: $30

Beauty/ Skincare: $143

Total: $1115.2

For majority of college student group, rent and food expenditure are the two largest basket our money flow to. But what shocked me was the total amount for beauty/ skincare products. Recently I am experimenting with new products, yet I didn’t realize it could cost these much until I did my calculation on my note pad.

Beauty expenditure could only get higher and higher, since once I started taking this as my biggest hobby, just like how my mom’s enthusiasm goes to cooking Chinese cuisine, I could only see myself spending more and more each time. This turns out to be not rare among students group, but smart girls knows how to manage her budget smartly. Therefore I decided to meet up with one of my old friend Yixuan, who is currently an actuarial science student at Purdue. Because of her educational background as analyzing and assessing financial/ insurance status all the time, she devotes her personal leisure time as well to manage her daily expenditure on the right track. Yixuan is interested in skincare rather than make-up products.

Basically Yixuan keeps her beauty and skincare budget around $350~400 per year. Instead of following the hype, she is quite good at keeping her self disciplined about spending money on beauty products. College students, especially Asian group, do care about skin condition and make-up. But when it comes to paying that money from your own pocket, it is not only about looking great, but keeping track of how much you spend as well.

As Yixuan said, she noticed that Asian students around her normally spend more on personal care and beauty, when we compare them to domestic students. As she indicated, international students normally don’t need to worry that much about supporting oneself financially, since their parents normally allow them with extra money to invest on skin care. In Asian culture, skin care is normally considered as a long-term investment. That pretty much explains why plastic surgical is such a trending thing in South Korea, even though it always comes with a sky-high price.